Customer Reviews

All Gall is Divided: Aphorisms

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E.M. Cioran, the Romanian decadent writer and anti-philosopher, stands firmly alongside the great aphorists, La Rouchefoucald, Lichtenberg, Nietzsche, with this compilation of stiletto epigrams. Paradoxical and iconoclastic, he treats of subjects as varied as language, death, music, despair, philosophy, religion and love. He represents one of the most unrelenting currents in nihilist thought, as he directs the solvent of his scepticism against everything -- (even scepticism itself) -- all with the most polished prose and a hard, gem-like brilliance. "The history of ideas is the history of the spite of certain solitaries." -- "Leukemia is the garden where God blooms." -- "The Creation was the first act of sabotage." -- "For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa." -- "Events -- tumours of Time." Of such a quality are Cioran's rapier-sharp aphorisms. However, the beauty of his style draws our attention to another, more deep-lying paradox. That in his distrust of humanity, his yearning for extinction and hatred of life, Cioran, with his tremendous stylistic gifts, actually succeeds in finding a route towards affirming life all the more happily and courageously. Even the strength of a certain drive to nothingness, this quanta of the hatred of life, converts itself, in spite of itself, as an ever more potent stimulant to life.

From MY 1980S by Wayne Koestenbaum: "On a train I read ROLAND BARTHES by Roland Barthes (translated by Richard Howard): I looked out dirty windows onto dirty New Jersey fields. I began to take autobiography seriously as a historical practice with intellectual integrity. On an airplane I read Michel Leiris's MANHOOD (translated by Richard Howard) and grooved to Leiris's mention of a 'bitten buttock'; I decided to become, like Leiris, a self-ethnographer. I read Gide's THE IMMORALIST (translated by Richard Howard) in Hollywood, Florida, while lying on a pool deck. I read many books translated by Richard Howard."

Good thing, too. I'd be lost without Richard Howard because I don't know French. But he should've given the title a direct translation. Which would be: SYLLOGISMS OF BITTERNESS.

Certainly a brilliant exposition of nihilistic thought. Yet, by his skills of expression...and the artful conception of his notions...Mr. Cioran actually, inadvertently, provides strong evidence contradicting his bleak interpetation of life and the human spirit.

The wonder is that he never seems to realize it.

And so it seems to go with others of this persuasion: aetheists, anarchists, and those who cling purely to the scientific view of things.

Their art, their emotion, their intellects, and their passion stand in ironic contrast to their points of view.

Go figure.

E. M. Cioran certainly belongs in the ranks of the best epigrammists. He had the gift of brevity. His remarks focus or refocus the mind, like the best aphorisms do. Also, they are as bitter as a hydrochloric acid martini. (Click the nearby link to read an excerpt) If Sartre had had the gift of speaking in quotes, he might have resembled Cioran to a degree. Yet Cioran was _so_ disaffected, _so_ shackled with irony, _so_ sure that he saw through everything, even skepticism itself, that he never would have bothered to construct a philosophical edifice like Sartre's.

The problem with this collection is that it was originally published in the early Fifties, and Cioran was a depressive. So, most of Cioran's political and religious observations have been soundly refuted by the events of the subsequent half-century. The West was not rotten and exhausted; the Catholic church was not a gilt mausoleum; the way forward was not only downward. He made the quite simple and quite avoidable error of projecting his own personal misfortune onto the whole universe. So go ahead--partake of this sour spirits, in small drams. The chapters of quotes on things like music, solitude, and that French favorite The Void hold up very well. Just don't mistake it for real life.

1)Even Nihilism should have its limits

2)Bile is only one of the four humors

3) God and the world are with us- Neitzsche and Cioran write no new aphorisms today

4) The bitter should occasionally prepare us for the sweet

5) Cleverness and bad humor provide momentary guilty pleasure

6) The Good is also Real

7) The gall of this Gaul is not always a Gevalt

8) When you look down you invariably go lower

9) As Rona Barrett once said after trashing half of humanity "Cioran, Keep thinking those good thoughts"

10) Thoreau said " Every day is a new day to dawn.The sun is but a morning star" He too was an aphorist.